Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB 2400C10 Memory Kit Review

CORSAIR just recently launched their brand new Vengeance Pro series kits. These are designed to set new levels in value and overclocking. With a new stylish and aggressive looking heat spreader design, available in four different flavors: Blue, Gold Red and Silver color. The current products range up from 8GB to a whopping 64GB kit. The rated speeds start of at 1600MHz up to 2933MHz for the flagship version; especially the high end versions are being optimized for Intel's 4th generation Haswell processors. At Computex 2013, CORSAIR already showed higher specced versions, though if these will ever hit the shelves remains a big question. The today's reviewed Vengeance Pro kit is one of the more enthusiast targeted kits, comprising out of two 8GB 2400MHz Cas 10 DIMMs, with a red accent finish.

Test Setup and Methodology

The new heat spreader is easily removable via unclipping the, in our case, red top. Then gently pull them apart and they will pop off.

No real surprise to see Samsung HYKO ICs on these DIMMs. The 8 layer black PCB gives these Vengeance Pro a real, there's that word again, Pro look.

Now what have we tested: first it has to become clear if a high speed RAM kit is worth the extra cash over a more budget friendly mainstream kit. Hence why we opted to simulate a 1600C9-9-9-27 kit with our Vengeance Pro kit.

A quick sum up of the tested speeds:

1600Mhz C9-9-9-27 1T 1.6Vdimm ( Vengeance Pro simulated )

2400Mhz C10-12-12-31 2T 1.65Vdimm( Stock speeds )

When we tried to overclock these 8GB DIMMs it became quickly clear that they run out of steam once you surpass 2500MHz, only loosening the primary timings to C11-12-13 allowed us to maintain stability. However 2600MHz was no go to complete our test suite. Only with massively loosened secondary and tertiary timings could we succesfully finish SuperPi 32M at 2600MHz, yet at a crawling pace. How about a score that's over 1 minute slower then the out of the box speeds ? Time to rethink our strategy and see how tight we can run these ICs.

Too bad Intel doesn't allow memory tweaking inside the windows. After a dozen reboots we got the following timings stable:

2400MHz C9-11-12-27 1T at 1.72Vdimm

Not bad at all, we had no issues to run 1T command rate too at these speeds. Below one of the many Memtest86 V5.00 screenshots we took during preliminary testing for stability.

C9-10-12-27 1T is also perfectly possible if you increase VDIMM to 1.76. Below some of the screenshots of the [M]Test Suite